Categories

Meta

club soda

This post is a listing of some of my recent writings elsewhere. From looking at the date of the previous post I can confirm that I have been busy, with no time to update this blog…

The big thing for Club Soda in the Summer of 2017 was our, and the UK’s, first Mindful Drinking Festival. It was in August at Bermondsey Square in South London, and was a roaring success. Nearly 50 non-alcoholic drinks brands were there, as well as food stalls, beer yoga, talks and tastings, and much more. The weather was on our side too, as the Sunday of the festival was the only sunny day of that and the following week – as seen in the photo above. And we estimated that 2,500 people came to try the drinks on offer. And “mindful drinking” suddenly became a big thing, listed on the Guardian as a “trend”.

There are some images and videos from the festival on Club Soda website. Afterwards, I wrote a guest blog for the Institute of Alcohol Studies: Club Soda hosts the first-ever Mindful Drinking Festival. I also wrote a guest blog for A hangover free life: Mindful Drinking Festival & Alcohol Free Drinks In Recovery. This article tackles the issue of whether people with alcohol misuse problems should avoid non-alcoholic beers and wines. The Club Soda view is that they can be really helpful in many ways, and it’s only if they trigger you to drink “the real thing” should you avoid them.

CAMRA also had their annual beer festival, and I did my second annual analysis of the alcohol-content of the real ales on offer. The main finding is that the average ABV has gone up slightly from last year, which I really wasn’t expecting. And the lower-alcohol choice is still more or less non-existent at this event.

The news for the next two months is that we are organising the second Mindful Drinking Festival, this one a pre-Christmas event, on 24 and 25 November at Spitalfields Market. So I will most likely be too busy to update this blog for a few weeks again…

And low/no beers were a bit of a feature at Morning Advertiser’s MA500 pub event in Liverpool in May, where we were invited to talk about the Guide, and beer writer Pete Brown led a tasting of 0.5% beers and cider.

So that’s been the spring. The summer will mostly be taken by the organisation of UK’s first Mindful Drinking Festival that Club Soda is putting together in August, at Bermondsey Square. We are bringing together some of the best beers and wines under 0.5% abv as well as some great new soft drinks and even newer things like kombucha.

And we are also hoping to make some noise about the UK’s out-of-date labelling rules and regulations on low and no-alcohol drinks. It is an absolute mess at the moment, and so complicated that even lawyers are having a hard time figuring out what you can and can’t call “alcohol-free”.

I was asked to write a guest blog to University College London Centre for Behaviour Change‘s Digi-Hub. My brief was to talk about collaboration between businesses and academia, in particular from the point of view of a small startup company like Club Soda.

My post, which is part of a longer series of guest blogs, deals with evidence, evaluation, and the tension that working across organisational boundaries can create.

It’s been a bit beery recently. First, I wrote for the Club Soda blog about the low and no alcohol beers available in Finland. Things have moved on while I’ve been away, and the choice is really rather good these days, and the taste (mostly) very pleasing too.

And last week, for Nudging Pubs, I had a quick look at the number of lower alcohol beers on offer at the Great British Beer Festival, CAMRA’s annual real ale and cider celebration. In this case, I wasn’t very impressed…

We’re working on an assessment tool to use with pubs and bars. The tool is meant to measure how welcoming the venues are to their non-drinking (or “less-drinking”) customers. We have been pondering all the various factors we could include in the tool, and how to classify them.

Having met some people from the Behaviour and Health Research Unit (BHRU) at Cambridge, they pointed me to their paper “Altering micro-environments to change population health behaviour: towards an evidence base for choice architecture interventions” in BMC Public Health. It could just help us get some of our ideas in order too.

The article has a nice typology for “choice architecture interventions in micro-environments”; I’ll just call them nudges from now on. There are nine types of nudges in this scheme:

Ambience (aesthetic or atmospheric aspects of the environment)

Functional design (design or adapt equipment or function of the environment)

Labelling (or endorsement info to product or at point-of-choice)

Presentation (sensory properties & visual design)

Sizing (product size or quantity)

Availability (behavioural options)

Proximity (effort required for options)

Priming (incidental cues to alter non-conscious behavioural response)

Prompting (non-personalised info to promote or raise awareness)

The first five types change the properties of “objects of stimuli”, the next two the placement of them, and the final two both the properties and placement.

I can see how we could use this as a basis for our thinking on the factors we want to measure pubs and bars on. For example, some basics like the choice of non-alcoholic / low-alcohol drinks would be about Availability, display of non-alcoholic drinks could be Presentation, Proximity and also Priming, drinks promotions would be Prompting and Labelling, and staff training could perhaps be about Prompting too?

I can’t instantly think of anything that we couldn’t fit into the typology (although we might need some flexibility of interpretation!). Interestingly, when the Cambridge researchers reviewed the existing literature, they could only find alcohol related nudges of the ambience, design, labelling, priming and prompting types. And not many studies overall, especially compared to research on diet which was the most popular topic for these types of nudges.

On the other hand, we could probably also find at least one metric for every one of the nine types of nudges, but they might not be the most interesting or important ones for this project. But it could still be a useful exercise to go through.